On 07.06.2010, at 19:41, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Wednesday 02 June 2010 19:18:37 Ehud Kaplan wrote:
>> Steve,
>> To place a logo (or any other element of a template) with vfill, hfill,
>> etc. is way too much work, since you have to do it on every slide,
>> dodging the other important stuff that the slide is to carry-- that is
>> what a template is supposed to do.
>> I'd be pretty happy with Beamer if they only added to the \logo{}
>> statement, in addition to the [height=..] option, a position argument.
>> It seems like it should be a rather small thing for them.
>>
>> EK
>
> Ehud,
>
> I'm trying to join the Beamer-LaTeX mailing list in order to find a solution
> to this problem. As you correctly pointed out, there's no obvious way to use
> \vskip within either \logo or \footer -- it won't compile. Unfortunately it's
> a very hard list to join (yeah, I know that's weird).
>
> You've identified a serious shortcoming of Beamer, and I'm trying very hard
> to
> find a way around it, because I plan on using Beamer a lot.
Steve (and others),
I know that you a are a friend of pragmatic solutions (recalling the recurring
discussion on how to do the front matter), so here is mine with respect to
beamer, which kind of resembles your front-matter approach :-)
I tried for about a day to implement my group's slide style with beamer,
including a logo on every slide, of course, but also some other graphical
elements. (If there is one thing I really dislike about beamer than it are the
standard styles. I have seen them just too many times, they look all the same.
IMHO, it should not be overly obvious to the audience which tool the presenter
has used to create her presentation!)
After fiddling around just too long with pgfimage and Co I gave up and went for
the brute force approach. I "draw" the slide style with my graphics program of
choice into an PDF image of exactly 128x96 mm (the dimensions of a beamer
slide). Then I install this as the "background" image on every page. I do not
use any additional beamer style stuff, and -- voila, there we are. In the style
file this looks as follows:
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
% background image setup
%
% This is the real trick :-) All graphical elements of the i4-layout are just
% in the background image. To support the "plain"-option for frames, we actually
% need two different background images (and probably a third one for the title
% slide, don't know yet)
%
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\usebackgroundtemplate{
\ifbea...@plainframe%
\includegraphics[width=\paperwidth]{beamerthemei4_bgplain}%
\else %
\includegraphics[width=\paperwidth]{beamerthemei4_bg}
\fi%
}
Of course, this approach is not really the "beamer philosophy". You cannot
combine it as smoothly with outer styles, inner styles, and all this stuff ...
but what the heck -- I do not need (pseudo-) variety, I need just ONE style
"done right".
Here is a link to an example presentation:
http://www4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/Publications/2010/urban_10_aosd-slides.pdf
Daniel
